I have firefox already running on my system, and now in minimised state. What I want is to close the current tab running in firefox. How can I do this by simply using commands in terminal?
3 Answers
To keep Firefox
minimized after closing its current tab (according to OP, see the comment) use the following commands in a terminal,
wmctrl -a firefox; xdotool key Ctrl+w; wmctrl -r firefox -b add,shaded
How it works
wmctrl -a firefox
Go to the window with a name containing 'firefox' in it
xdotool key Ctrl+w
Send the keystroke Ctrl+W to firefox which is the shortcut to close current tab in firefox.
wmctrl -r firefox -b add,shaded
Shade a window with a title that contains the word 'firefox' in it.
To know more about these see man xdotool
and man wmctrl
Alias for above command
You can make an alias for the above commands, say the alias name be cfct
( Close Firefox Current Tab) in ~/.bashrc
or better in ~/.bash_aliases
from a terminal as,
echo -e "\nalias cfct='wmctrl -a firefox; xdotool key Ctrl+w; wmctrl -r firefox -b add,shaded'" >> ~/.bash_aliases
. ~/.bash_aliases
If you don't have ~/.bash_aliases
replace ~/.bash_aliases
in the above commands with ~/.bashrc
Usage
open a terminal and enter
cfct
And it will close Firefox’s current tab instantaneously.
Note: You need to have wmctrl
and xdotool
installed in your system. To install them use,
sudo apt-get install wmctrl xdotool
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the browser window gets opened, which is not supposed to. how to avoid this? Feb 15, 2014 at 20:37
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Quite unreliable in that it sends Ctrl+W to the last opened window, regardless if it is Firefox or not.– kiriFeb 16, 2014 at 6:42
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@m3nda You can switch tabs before you close the tab. You can switch to the first tab using Alt+1 or use any other number to switch to a different 𝑛th tab. To close the 2nd tab for example:
wmctrl -a firefox; xdotool key Alt+2; xdotool key Ctrl+w; wmctrl -r firefox -b add,shaded
– mchidDec 5, 2019 at 0:25
You can install this Add-on: https://github.com/bard/mozrepl/wiki and enable it with Tools->MozRepl->Start. After that you can script Firefox from outside. Create following test.js file:
window.getBrowser().removeCurrentTab()
repl.quit()
And run it following way:
nc localhost 4242 < test.js
Just press Ctrl+Alt+T on your keyboard to open Terminal. When it opens, run the command(s) below:
xkill
and click on the tab you want to close.
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